Six months ago I joined an art academy. In this post I will jot down some thoughts about academic drawing for my elucidation and your entertainement.
As usual, this post will be updated in the future, so stay tuned.

What is academic drawing

My understanding is that there's two main academic methods: Russian and French.
The Russian academic method focuses on drawing from life, composition, construction, and a particular treatment of the shadows. Its center of gravity is the Repin academy in St Petersburg.
The French academic method mixes copying and drawing from life, composition comes later, not as much focus on construction, shadows are mostly flat. Its center of gravity is the Fine arts academy of Paris.
If you look at the same cast drawn in the two styles the difference should be pretty obvious, at least when it comes to the treatment of shadows.
There's a third academic method which I would call the American, where great emphasis is given to sight-size. For the non-initiate, "sight-size" means copying something as big as you see it. For copying a drawing, this means copying the drawing at 1:1 scale. For copying an object, the size will depend on how far or how close to you it is. A lot of academies around the world, even outside of the US, use this method in combination with Bargue plates.
Where is Italy in all of this? Here's the fun fact. All these methods claim to be a replica or even the continuation of the Italian renaissance method. I think this is absolutely not true for the French and American, which are relatively modern. The Russian academy was founded by Piotr the Great who wanted to bring Italian Renaissance to Russia, so at least the intention here is very explicit. I believe however that none of them come even close to the "bottega" method of Renaissance Florence.

Bargue plates

Bargue plates are drawings of casts that were used in 19th century France to instruct students of design. I will spare you the historical anectodes. The plates were sold in a book that became popular and was used by none others than Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh.
The plates are organized in terms of difficulty making it easy for self learners to improve their technique. As the legend goes, the Bargue plates were pretty much forgotten in the first half of the 20th century, only to be rediscovered and adopted in the USA. Nowadays Bargue plates are extremely popular in the academic world and the de-facto standard is to copy them 1:1, aka sight-size.
When I first joined the academy, I showed my instructor one of my latest plates copy, hoping to impress him. He was however nonplussed "oh, a Bargue, yeah, we don't do that here". As it turns out, Russians (I'm using this term liberally to mean anyone practicing the Russian academic method) don't use Bargues and contrary to some online courses, don't even use sight-size! In the first month I basically had to unlearn a lot of what Bargue had "taught" me. Not everything, but a lot.
If you have no other way to attend an Academy and you don't like the French method, you can always find Russian cast drawings to copy on Pinterest. I think it's a valid substitution to copying Bargues, in fact, my teacher is suggesting me to do just that on top of my work in the studio.

Why Bargues are "bad"

I think Bargues have their merits, but from the Russian perspective, they're not a useful teaching tool. Why?
First of all, Russians are not interested in sight-size. Secondly, copying a plate means that all the decisions regarding composition and light are already taken. Thirdly, Bargue plates have their shadows "flat" which means there is (sometimes) absolutely zero contrast within the shadow, due to an absence of reflected light inside, and no shadow line to speak of. Furthermore, Bargues don't show a significant difference in contrast in the first plane vs background.
Finally, Russians do master copies, of course, but mostly believe that you should copy from life.

Drawing is a project

Before joining the academy, my longest drawing took me maybe 10 hours. In my mind, I couldn't think of taking more than that. As my instructor puts it, that 10 hours drawing was a "sketch". My last cast drawing took me 52 hours. Part of it is because I just couldn't see a way to improve the drawing, my eyes were not refined, part of it is that I wasn't treating my works as projects.
In each academic method I mentioned, one does not simply start drawing the part they like the most and keeps adding shadows or details. That would be insane, you need to have a plan.
Judging from the type of instruction I receive, I would say that planning is 75%, specific technique is 20%, artistic choice (outside of composition) is 5%. This means that most of the time we discuss which parts need work, in which order, to which level of detail. Sometimes the teacher shows me how to render a particular shadow, how to block in to achieve a uniform tone, or how to design certain shapes. Rarely and usually at the end, we see if there's something we want to highlight more or if we find a cool way to do the background.
Regarding planning, there's a series of steps that's usually followed:

• you make a small sketch to understand composition and get familiar with the object (kinda useless for Bargues). This is sometimes skipped if you have a model only for a short time
• you copy the sketch on the board. For Bargues this might be equivalent to starting with the "envelope" shape and refining it. At this stage you have a line drawing. Some academies push this stage further making sure you don't erase on the final paper to preserve its lifespan
• an initial shadow line is drawn. We start blocking in. To "block in" means to draw a flat tone inside the shadows

After this point, I only know how to work within the Russian framework

• planes in the light are indicated roughly with halftones
• shadow lines are refined and maximum contrast is achieved in the features (if it's a portrait) or on the plane closer to us (if it's a portrait, first features then first plane)
• We work in different parts of the drawing to achieve the correct level of contrast, focusing on the first plane and removing details from the back planes. Contrast is achieved both with tone and with details
• Finally, we might add a background

On simplifying

This is another thing that shocked me at first and I think it deserves its own paragraph.
In many tutorials you find online, you will hear an instructor telling you to "simplify". Turn an arm into a cylinder, turn a car into a box, etc. This instruction is correct within its context. In the context of academic drawing, this is terrible advice. I'm not entirely sure where this advice comes from because I heard it from people in different backgrounds, be it fine art, life drawing, animation, concept art etc.
It's probably OK to simplify to understand basic proportions or perspective and it's certainly OK not to jump into the details straight away. When doing a finished and polished drawing however, the very last thing we want to do is simplify! I'm often reminded how my lines are "too simple" and that I need to get closer to the model to find the right shape. Obviously there's a balance between crazy details and one swooping line. I'm not asked to draw every pore, but rather to find the correct anatomy within the silouette every single time, and this shape cannot be reduced to a C, S or I line, not even in 2 minutes poses!
When watching animation however, we find many simplified figures and so are many famous and interesting gesture drawings you can look at online. Again, I'm not critizing simplification per se, just know that it doesn't have a place within any academy and it will be something to unlearn very early.

Some small things I learned

What I initially noticed, right from my first lesson, was how many little things I was doing wrong.
First of all, I was sharpening my pencil in a shape similar to a javelin. The lead was exposed and thin but still had a "point" at the end. I was told to sharpen it as a needle, thinning all the way up to a sharp point. I thought this was important only if you focus on drawing with the side of the pencil, but it actually influences all positions. You have no idea how different it makes your lines. Try it.
Draw with the side of the pencil and only darken the shadow line, everything else is just tone. I was taught at some point (youtube? an online course?) to draw with the side of the pencil but then to make a darker line once the proportions were accurate. This doesn't make much sense because there's only one true line, the shadow line, everything else is tone.
Don't measure in parts, don't measure angles. This is the one that shocked me the most. My instructor never measures angles. When I asked him about it, he said measuring angles is useless because there's no way to be accurate and it assumes that our drawings will be perfect copies. He also told me to never measure in parts, e.g. "this is 3 times as big as that" because it's just impossible to make an accurate assessment. Similarly, I was told only to measure when something "feels" off. As a result we measure very, very little compared to our French and American colleagues.
Another interesting tradition in Russian Academic drawing is the focus on stretching the paper. You can stretch the paper on a board or ehm, stretchers. It took me forever to finally achieve a good result and wasted plenty of paper in the process, but now I cannot think how I would draw without this. Why is it so important to stretch? I wouldn't say it's essential, but it makes it easier to draw. You don't have tape or clips ruining your paper and you can be sure you're always drawing at the same height. When I asked my instructor why is it so important to stretch the paper, he told me it's the only way to tone it. I tried drawing on self-toned paper and believe me, it's awesome. The idea is that you tone it very lightly with gouache so any erasure will expose the maximum light.

This is all I could think of for now. I will update as soon as I learn more.